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bare bones
plural noun
- the irreducible minimum; the most essential components:
Reduce this report to its bare bones. There is nothing left of the town but the bare bones—a couple of stores, a church, and a few houses.
bare-bones
adjective
- basic or simple; no-frills
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Other Words From
- bare-bones adjective
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Word History and Origins
Origin of bare bones1
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Idioms and Phrases
The mere essentials or plain, unadorned framework of something, as in This outline gives just the bare bones of the story; details will come later . This phrase transfers the naked skeleton of a body to figurative use. [c. 1900]Discover More
Example Sentences
This year, a bare-bones welfare program will continue into the New Year without being updated.
Maybe, just maybe he'd be able to get the message across if he stripped it down to its bare bones.
The bare bones of an already-anemic effort to fight the epidemic in West Africa that is threatening to destroy the entire region.
As TechCrunch pointed out, the brilliance in its bare bones appeal could reach a worth of one billion dollars.
He was getting only the bare bones, none of the rich details that make a book sing.
Here in a few paragraphs are the bare bones of the plan described in eighty of Henry James's pages.
A lot of speculation necessarily clothed the bare bones of Jones' information.
Hiawatha looked on wistfully to see them eat till they were fully satisfied, and they left him nothing but the bare bones.
It was the bare bones of this old earth, as sombre and foreboding as any ruin of granite under the wrack of the bleak north.
I have lived to see the people who go into the desert for adventure, and whose bare bones are all any man looks on again!
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Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
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